Under different circumstances, you might expect a raucous, positive atmosphere at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium on Sunday.

Spurs — and their head coach Thomas Frank — will be returning from their mid-week European triumph, a 2-0 win at Eintracht Frankfurt that confirmed a fourth-place finish in the Champions League’s league phase. For a team returning to the competition after a two-season absence, it represents a real achievement.

And Frank was warmly applauded by the away end on Wednesday night, a stark contrast from the supporters’ recent mood.

January has been a difficult month, to put it mildly. The Premier League results have been disastrous, with Spurs taking just three points from five games, none against top sides. The defining sound has been booing. Fans booed Frank after the 0-0 draw at Brentford, the 3-2 defeat at Bournemouth, and then with even more force after the 2-1 home defeat to West Ham United and the 2-2 draw at Burnley.

That negativity has corroded Frank’s standing at Spurs over time. What no one knows today is the impact of Wednesday’s triumph on Sunday’s mood. Last week, Spurs beat Borussia Dortmund 2-0 at home and all was well with the world. Then, last Saturday, Tottenham went to Burnley, played poorly, dropped two more points, and the fans were furiously on Frank’s back again. That is before we even consider the effect of Spurs playing Manchester City, who are four points behind Arsenal in the title race.

Enough has been said already about the fans, Frank’s position, his strengths and weaknesses, and his future.

If the last few weeks have taught us anything, it is that the club’s boardroom executives control the head coach’s future, and they have been consistently supportive of Frank since his appointment in June.

The hierarchy will soon face more pressure from fans than they have at any point since Daniel Levy’s dismissal in September. That was the Year Zero moment, the sudden rupture when the Lewis family took back control of the club.

The old way of doing things, built around Levy, was out. In came a new modern corporate structure. At the heart of it was CEO Vinai Venkatesham, who had arrived earlier in the summer. There was a new non-executive chairman, Peter Charrington, a private banker and a long-standing Lewis family associate, who had joined the board in March. Venkatesham, knowing that so much power had been concentrated at the top over recent years, started to put together a new ‘executive leadership team’ to run the club.

After Levy’s departure, fans were curious to see how the club would function in this new era. They wanted to know whether the Lewis family shared their own ambitions for the club, and whether it would be any better for Spurs than the last few years of Levy’s tenure. Five months on, the mood does not seem any better than it was last year. And this time, there is no Levy-shaped shield to protect the family from criticism.

On Sunday, there will be another ‘Change for Tottenham’ protest, including a planned walkout 15 minutes before the end of the game. The numbers may not be as big as they were for the protest marches this time last year, when Levy was still in situ, but some of the arguments that were used to criticise Levy are already being used against the Lewis family. The chants of “ENIC Out” do not distinguish between the two.

A group of Spurs fans protest against the club’s owners this month (Vince Mignott/Getty Images)

What many fans want to see is clear direction and leadership, a feeling of things being firmly gripped and acted upon. The challenge for the club’s decision-makers is that no matter how hard they are all working in private, only a very limited part of what they do is visible to the public. If they wanted to publicly prove to the fans that they are acting decisively, changing the head coach or buying more players would be the most obvious ways. By sticking with Frank, they are largely going to be judged on their performance in the winter transfer market, where they have signed Conor Gallagher and Souza. Fans will hope to see more before the window shuts.

Following Levy’s departure, the whole club was overhauled. There is little public interest in under-the-radar appointments and new boardroom processes — it is not why anyone got into football — but at the same time, it is necessary to have a club that works. Trying to do this while playing out a season (and a difficult season at that) is akin to trying to rebuild a plane mid-flight. In October, Tottenham brought back Fabio Paratici as one of two sporting directors, alongside Johan Lange, only for him to decide to return to Italian football with Fiorentina two months later.

The other focus in the post-Levy era is communication. Tottenham are better at this than they used to be, and Venkatesham has spoken to the fanbase a handful of times since he arrived, even if not as often as some fans would like (he is perhaps unfortunate that his first interview was sat alongside Levy, less than three months before Levy was sacked). But there is also extra responsibility on Venkatesham to talk in public, not just for the club, but for the Lewis family too.

When Venkatesham spoke to the Tottenham website in the days after Levy’s sacking, he was effectively speaking for the family. When he issued his long letter to fans this month, shedding light on recruitment priorities, he was giving the first real insight into the football strategy of this new era.

Tottenham Hotspur Sporting Director Johan Lange and CEO Vinai Venkatesham (Andrew Matthews/Getty Images)

Ultimately, the future of the football club rests on that relationship between the club’s management, led by Venkatesham, and the majority shareholding Lewis family.

Venkatesham and his team are responsible for the daily running of the club. The Lewis family do not want to get involved in nuts and bolts every day. They want to trust, empower and back the professional management. But when it comes to major strategic decisions, the family will naturally be involved.

Frank revealed in a press conference last week about having lunch with Nick Beucher, Venkatesham and Lange on January 19, and then again with Beucher and Lange on January 22. Beucher, who is Vivienne Lewis’ son-in-law, is one of the more visible and involved members of the Lewis family, effectively acting as a conduit between the family and the club. Charrington, who replaced Levy as chair, performs the same function too. Frank, speaking last week, said that Beucher, Vivienne Lewis and Charrington were “very, very determined”, “very, very committed” and “very, very into it”.

These are the relationships that will determine the club’s future. Venkatesham, who held a similar role at Arsenal, has plenty of experience running a large football club, but for others, this is a much newer experience. They have taken on a huge job trying to rebuild and turn around Tottenham Hotspur.

Frank did not necessarily endear himself to fans when he said he was turning the “super-tanker” around, but that is the scale of the job. Whatever happens in 2026, it will be Spurs’ new-look hierarchy who are responsible for its success.